Bixie

A Bixie (Chinese: 辟邪; pinyin: bìxié, Wade–Giles: Pi-hsieh; Japanese: 辟邪, へきじゃ, Hekija) is a type of lion-like mythological Chinese creature, or chimera. It is considered as an exorcising animal (辟邪 literally means "Avoid Evil") and is usually hornless. See also Pixiu.

The Bixie can have a pair of wings, which makes it rather similar to the Tianlu (Chinese: 天禄, Japanese: 天禄, てんろく, Tenroku) in following early Chinese sculptural traditions of winged celestial beasts.

The Bixie may have been an adoption from Mesopotamian art, through Persia and Bactria, as a consequence of extensive trade relations initiated by Emperor Han Wudi during the Han period.

Some western scholars of Chinese art use the word "chimera" generically to refer to the bixie, qilin, and tianlu.

Celadon from the Western Jin period (265-317)

Celadon from the Western Jin period (265-317)

Sculpture in the Shanghai Museum

Sculpture in the Shanghai Museum

Stone statue from Luoyang during the Eastern Han period (25-220)

Emoticon

An emoticon (/ᵻˈmoʊtᵻkɒn/ or /iˈmoʊtᵻkɒn/), etymologically a portmanteau of emotion and icon, is a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression that, in the absence of body language and prosody, serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal non-verbal communication, changing and improving its usually distinguished as a 3-5 character piece — usually by means of punctuation marks (though it can include numbers and letters) — a person's feelings or mood, though as emoticons have become more popular, some devices have provided stylized pictures that do not use punctuation.

In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticons called kaomoji (顔文字, often confused with emoji in the West) that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.

As social media has become widespread, emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication.